


Waves

by Serindrana



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: F/F, Femslash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-15
Updated: 2012-01-15
Packaged: 2017-10-29 13:59:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/320683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Serindrana/pseuds/Serindrana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Kirkwall, Bethany is assigned to the Warden outpost in Amaranthine. The trip across the Waking Sea gives her time enough to realize that being sent home is not a punishment, and sets her mind to undulations, rises and falls. Mhairi's made of scars and stories and dreams, and Bethany falls into them when are own are quiet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waves

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Combination_NC](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Combination_NC/gifts).



Her first posting after she parts ways with Marian and the rest in the wreckage of Kirkwall is in Ferelden. Something about that hurts, a deep twisting pain, and she wonders if it’s meant to be a punishment. But the boat ride across the Waking Sea soothes her with the rocking of the waves, and she realizes that it’s meant to be a gift. A break. A return home. A little bit of relief in the ocean of chaos that everybody fears is beginning to stir.

They can’t know that she has no home to return to, only ashes of a lost father and a lost brother, a lost hometown, a lost future.

They can’t know how desperately it reminds her of how she only ever wanted to be _normal_.

Seven years ago, when she had crossed this same sea with her mother and her sister and Aveline, the waves had made her unbearably ill. They had been stuck in the hold and she had been reduced to retching in the corner, into a bucket if it wasn’t full already, and onto the floor if not. Now, her stomach is still. She wonders if it’s the taint that soothes it now, even as it keeps her awake at night. The days are easy, the nights are horrid- just the opposite of how it was before.

It might also be that she stands on the deck now, unaccosted and eyes trained on the horizon. She sees the dips coming, feels the roll in her legs and hips. She rocks with the rocking of the ship, and she wonders if this is what Isabela knows.

It’s lovely, whatever it is, in its own way.

___

She’s on the deck when Amaranthine City comes into sight. One of the other Wardens she travels with told her the night before that the city had been burned to the ground shortly after the Blight, and she can see the evidence. The walls are not so high and are still half made of wood. The buildings are far sparser than any city she has ever seen. And when they dock, there are only two other ships, and they aren’t made for anything other than coastal jaunts.

She’s sad to leave the rise and fall of the ship; solid ground feels too solid, and too real. Amaranthine smells and sounds nothing like Lothering, or like Gwaren either. It’s not Kirkwall. It’s not Ansburg. It’s…

Bethan sighs and runs a hand through her hair. It’s home, for the next six months at least, and she would do well to start thinking like that.

They’re met by four Wardens. She’s met one before, an older elf whose hair is red streaked with silver and is pulled back tight. She fights with a sword nearly as big as she is, Bethany remembers, despite her slender frame. She reminds Bethany of Fenris just a little, and Bethany tries to remember if she really is from Tevinter or if that’s a story, imposed because of old friends.

The others she hasn’t met. There’s a man, tall and broad with a high forehead, everything about him overlarge. There’s a dwarf who wears his beard hung with the same sorts of rings Varric wears in his ears. And there’s a woman, only an inch or two taller than Bethany, whose dark hair is worn in small locks and who steps forward to greet them.

“Welcome to Amaranthine,” she says, gesturing with an open palm to the half-ruin of a city. “My name is Mhairi.”

___

They stay that night in an inn called the Crown and Lion. Mhairi tells her over dinner that it was completely destroyed in the battle with the Architect’s enemies, but that it was also the first thing rebuilt after temporary walls were built around the city. It’s an inn like any other, and it’s almost comforting. She tries to think of the Hanged Man in the best of times.

It helps that the others laugh and drink and relax, but the ground is very stable and very steady and when she walks she falters, because she expects it to pitch and surge. Mhairi catches her when she nearly topples her, a strong arm around her waist that’s more used to bearing shields than a hapless mage. Bethany smiles and excuses herself. Mhairi stays close to make sure she’s fine.

When Bethany asks - because she likes to hear the stories of others, even while she guards hers close - Mhairi tells her that she nearly died during her Joining. She stopped breathing, she says, and Varel (a name she gives details about as the night wears on, a name she respects and misses dearly) had thought her dead. But something had happened in her taint-fevered dream and she had woken up on the ground, screaming and thrashing and tearing great gashes in her arms. She rolls up her sleeves to show Bethany, and Bethany trails her fingers over them.

She thinks to tell Mhairi about her own scars, gained fighting for her life against darkspawn, against bandits, against templars, including the one that burns in bad weather, left by Meredith’s sword.

She doesn’t.

Mhairi is a good woman, and a lovely woman, and Bethany finds herself falling in to the sort of adoring love of a night’s acquaintance. Mhairi is built on ideals, ideals that Bethany will forever envy but feel she cannot come close to upholding. Mhairi _wants_  to be a Warden, as much as she has ever wanted anything, and she has found redemption in the blood and sweat and muck and darkness.

Bethany wants that, craves that, but she stays curled away.

___

The second night they reach the Vigil, a great stone keep that is at the top of a rise, Mhairi is the one to show her to her room. “It’s not big,” she says, “but it has a nice view. It’s the room I stayed in when I came here first.”

“Have you been here all this time?” Bethany asks as they stand in the doorway, Bethany clutching her meager belongings to her chest.

“No,” Mhairi says, “but they always let me return home eventually. I’m Fereldan to the core, and if I stay away for too long… but you understand, don’t you?”

Bethany wants to shake her head and deny it, but instead she hears herself say, “Yes, I do.”

“Where are you from?” Mhairi asks, leaning against the doorframe. Bethany finds herself looking at her kind smile, her expressive eyes.

“Lothering,” Bethany says, and she thinks of Sister Leliana, lovely and good.

“I’ve been there, ” Mhairi says. “They’re rebuilding. Have you had a chance to see?”

“I don’t think I could,” Bethany says.

Mhairi reaches out and takes her shoulder. “I understand,” she says, and Bethany believes her. Even though she has never believed an extension of support from another Warden, least of all one so dedicated as Mhairi, she believes this one. She has to.

She wants to.

___

“I met a woman from Rivain, once,” Bethany says in the yard, out of breath from drills and dreaming of the waves. “A pirate queen. She was one of the most beautiful and strongest women I’ve ever met, but I didn’t realize it at the time.”

Mhairi sits down beside her on the half-wall, stripped to leggings and a sleeveless tunic, glistening with sweat. “Did you, now? Your life sounds very exciting.”

“I wouldn’t call it exciting,” Bethany says with a shake of her head. She settles her hand near Mhairi’s, and leaves it there. It can’t hurt to hope (except that it can, and it has, but she decides to forget that. Forgetting things is a way of survival here, forgetting the sun and forgetting family).

“Better than wars,” Mhairi says. “A lot better. Wars aren’t something you dream about doing one day, but running away with a lovely pirate queen…”

Her gaze drops to Bethany’s knees, then slowly slides up as she hooks a finger over Bethany’s smallest.

“It is tempting, isn’t it,” Bethany says with a breathless laugh.

Mhairi nods, quietly, and then she leans in, and her breath skitters over Bethany’s cheek and ear. “Sitting in the sun with a beautiful mage from Lothering surpasses it though,” she says, and her voice trembles, nearly breaks, and Mhairi pulls back-

And Bethany follows her, stealing her first kiss in years and finding it warm and welcoming. Mhairi sighs and leans in, and the way her lips move of Bethany’s reminds her of the sea - rising and falling, soft and harsh, uncertain but unrelenting.

___

Her breathing is the same, at night, when Bethany lies beside her in the little room they’ve shared across years, Mhairi at the beginning and her now. Sometimes Mhairi breathes evenly. Other times her breath comes in fast gulps of air, her chest jerking, her scars tightening and releasing with every pained movement. Bethany knows them all well, but to watch it happen, with nothing but a light summer blanket between them, is something else entirely.

She cools her hands with a whisper of a spell and presses them to Mhairi’s forehead, her cheeks, stroking light over her skin. Mhairi smiles in her sleep, and she runs her fingers down her neck and shoulders, covering every inch of skin. Kisses follow after, laced with a burst of healing in each one. She has an idle thought that she could have never done this in a normal place, in a normal life.

It’s swallowed up in the soft sounds of Mhairi waking, her nightmares falling away.

She reached out and pulls Bethany close, smiling and blinking blearily. “My little Lothering mage,” she mumbles, and Bethany smiles in turn, nestling against her. “Did you know,” she continues, sleepily, “that I’ve always wanted to travel? They send me to Orlais when they send me anywhere at all. I’ve never been on a ship before.”

“They’re lovely,” Bethany tells her. “The sky is endless and the waves roll through you. It’s lovely.”

“I’d like to go, some day,” Mhairi sighs and buries her face against Bethany’s neck.

“Maybe Weisshaupt will send us to Rivain next,” Bethany murmurs, closing her eyes. “Or maybe we’ll meet a pirate queen. I hear she comes to Denerim every so often.”

“Next diplomatic trip,” Mhairi mumbles, and then she’s asleep again, and Bethany is left feeling the warm shivers of what Mhairi is best at - offering what Bethany never thinks to ask for.

 _Denerim_ , she thinks.

She’s never been there. Andraste was born there, according to the Chant, and she’s always wanted to see it.

She just hadn’t known it until Mhairi breathed its name.


End file.
